The Never List (28 page)

Tracy nodded. “That’s exactly right. But let’s just get out of here. None of that matters now.”

“Yes, it does,” I said quietly. “What if something she said to someone all those years ago could have prevented what happened to us? What if it revealed some criminal connection that Jack and Noah had fifteen years ago? Something that would have landed them in jail before Jack had had the chance to abduct us. Then what?”

“Come on, Sarah, that’s not fair. It’s not fair to put the blame on her.
Jack
did those things to us. He’s responsible. He’s the culpable one. Not her.” Christine leaned back in the seat, staring up at the roof of the car, thinking. “I mean, you can trace that blame all the way back down the chain. What about Jack’s mother? The
one who adopted him? She probably had some indication that her son was a little off. He was probably one of those kids who set fire to small animals or something. But she isn’t responsible for this either.”

“That’s different. And at the very least Helen Watson knew someone was suffering at Noah’s hands. Maybe she didn’t know about us, but she saw these girls riding through town all the time. She lived with it in front of her. And she was probably the only one who knew what was going on. The only other person besides the perpetrators and their clients. And she didn’t do anything. Just so she could keep her own dark secret.”

Tracy started the car and pulled out of the lot. “Let’s go get some sleep. Then we’ll see about who owned that post office box.”

     CHAPTER 32     

We spent the rest of the morning asleep in our new hotel rooms, missing the media frenzy over the Noah Philben story.

I woke up later that afternoon feeling uneasy. I surveyed the room, but nothing seemed out of the ordinary—the hotel air conditioner hummed quietly, and my folded clothes lay on the dresser in neat, ordered piles.

On my way into the bathroom, I saw an envelope slipped under my door. I assumed it was a note from the front desk, though I thought it strange that they didn’t use the creamy white stationery, stamped with the hotel’s logo, that was on my bedside table. I leaned down and picked it up, before I noticed the handwriting. At the sight of that familiar script, something inside me collapsed. I didn’t open it. I couldn’t bring myself to look at it alone, so I ran down the hall to Tracy’s room. It took several knocks to wake her up. Finally, she opened the door.

“Did you get one too?”

“What?” she said groggily.

“A letter. From Jack. Here at the hotel.” My voice was breaking. I felt frantic now. The old panic was back, rising inside me. “He knows where we are. How can he know that? Noah Philben’s men must have followed us, and now they are acting as couriers for Jack.”

I pointed at Tracy’s floor, just inside the doorway. There it was.
Her
letter. Tracy’s face seemed paler than ever as she stared at it, unmoving.

“Let’s get out of here. Go get your bags. I’ll get Christine.”

I ran back to my room and hastily threw my things into my suitcase. I told our security guard that we’d decided to go back to New York and were racing to catch a flight. He looked confused and made a phone call. Whoever was on the other line clearly needed him freed up for other duties, because we got the go-ahead.

I met Tracy and Christine in the lobby. As shaken as we were, somehow we managed to check out and run to the car, Tracy slipping behind the wheel. The tires spun out beneath us as we pulled out of the parking lot.

In the backseat, Christine was showing the first sign of nerves. “Do you think they’re still following us? Where do we go? Another hotel? Jesus, why did I get myself involved with this again?” She ran her hands along the inside of the car door. Even as we built up speed, I had a vision of her opening the door and jumping out to hail a cab back to Park Avenue.

“Christine,” Tracy began in an even and controlled tone, “be quiet unless you have something productive to say. I can’t handle panic right now. Read the letters to me.” Tracy was thinking, and scared.

I opened my letter first, holding it at the edges to avoid too much
contact with it, and read, “‘The family has finally reunited. I’m so pleased. Come home, and you will find the answers.’”

I threw the letter into the backseat and opened Christine’s.

“‘Girls, let’s take a family photograph. A tableau vivant. I have so much more to show you.’”

“Okay, next mine.” Tracy drove like a maniac.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“To see Adele.”

I felt a lump in my throat. “You don’t think—?” I could barely finish the thought, as it dawned on me that she was the only person who knew where we were staying, other than the police and the FBI.

“That she delivered these letters for Jack?” Tracy finished for me. “I don’t know. But either way I have a feeling that, like Helen, she knows more than she ought to, and it’s time to make her tell us before we go any further.”

I nodded and slowly opened Tracy’s letter, forcing myself to keep from throwing it out the window.

“‘You have studied so hard over the years, Tracy. So many books. I have written one just for you. In our special room.’”

I handed the final letter to Christine, amazed that she didn’t seem to mind touching them, as I watched her neatly pile them together.

“How did he get these letters out of the jail without them going through Jim?” she said. “I thought the prison was all over this and they monitored everything going in and out of that place. All the other letters came through Jim. We have to call him.”

I agreed, got out my phone, and dialed.

Jim answered, sounding like I’d woken him up.

“Did you get him? Did you arrest Noah?” I asked first.

“No. The place was empty—not a soul there. They obviously had a doomsday scenario mapped out, so they had an escape plan
ready. They left behind some computers, though. Our tech guys are working on breaking the codes now. They must have some real pros in their organization, because their security is extremely sophisticated.”

“Did you find any other girls?”

“No. But we could tell someone had been living there in some pretty rough circumstances. Listen, Sarah, this situation is very dangerous. We found—we found some shocking things in that compound. I can’t emphasize this enough: the three of you need to remain at the hotel until this situation stabilizes.”

“What? What did you find?”

Jim paused. But this time he probably wanted to scare us enough to make us stay put.

“The upstairs was set up like a church retreat: institutional furniture, bulletin boards, sign-up sheets. But underneath … Sarah, that entire compound sits on top of a labyrinth of underground rooms. That’s where the real operations were going on. It was a hellhole. Chains on the walls, torture devices everywhere, blood splatter on the floor, buckets for human waste shoved in corners. And there were video cameras all over the place. They were filming it all.”

“Filming it? Oh my God,” I said, repulsed.

“Yes,” Jim went on. “We ran image-matching software against some of the footage left behind, and it looks like some of it was recently uploaded to an Internet porn site dedicated to ‘true slaves.’ You can’t get into it without sharing files of the same kind of content, so the users are all hardcore. That must be how Noah gets his clients.”

I shut my eyes, as if that could keep the words he was saying out of my head.

“Jim. Listen.” My voice was shaking. “Jack sent us letters. They were delivered to our hotel today—slipped under our doors.”

“What? That’s not possible.”

“Oh, but it is. They are here. Christine is holding them in her hands right now.”

“What do they say?”

“His usual stuff. They make no sense, but that’s not the point. The point is that somehow he knew where we were. Doesn’t that mean the person Noah had following us is also reporting to Jack Derber? Jim, there is definitely a link between these two. Listen, can you have someone on your team find out who uses or has ever used post office box one hundred eighty-two in River Bend? Noah Philben was sending letters to that address, years ago.”

“One eighty-two?” I could hear his pen scratching over the line. “I got it, but listen, let me handle it. It’s my job. You three have been through enough.” He paused, perhaps realizing his understatement.

At that moment the car swerved hard as Tracy maneuvered to avoid a vehicle passing in the other lane. She leaned on the horn, cursing.

“Sarah, where are you?” Jim sounded upset. “Aren’t you in the hotel?”

I mouthed the word
fuck
and covered the phone. I didn’t want to tell him what we were doing. We needed to find these answers ourselves. We’d come so far, we didn’t want to be relegated to passive victims at this point, sitting back, waiting for some junior agent to be assigned this piece of the puzzle. But if we refused to stay at the hotel, Jim might order us into full protective custody.

I changed the subject.

“Jim, what do you know about Jack’s childhood?”

“Sarah—”

“Jim, just … for my information …”

“Sarah, let’s talk later—but the truth is, we don’t know much.”

“Please, Jim. Tell me something.”

Jim sighed the way he did when he was about to give in.

“He bounced around the foster care system for a while, until the Derbers adopted him when he was about fourteen. Before that, well, unfortunately the record-keeping system for Child Protective Services was not so great back then. His file was lost. His social worker was killed in a car accident about fifteen years ago. No one else has any idea about his past.”

“Well, we might be piecing some of it together. Let’s talk tomorrow.”

“Sarah, go back to the hotel.
Now
. We’ll double security. Leave those letters with Officer Grunnell. We’ll find out what’s going on. Someone called in a tip about Noah, so I’ll most likely be gone all night, but I’ll be by to check on you in the morning.”

I pushed the off button on my phone and repeated to the others what Jim had discovered at Noah’s compound. We all stared straight ahead, trying to piece it together, to understand what it all meant.

Finally, I dared to look at the others. Christine’s hands were still now, but her eyes were darting right and left, her face flushed. She had appeared completely together, our savior, the meticulously assembled Upper East Side mother, just a few hours before. Now she was starting to remind me of the Christine I had known all those years ago.

Had this Christine been lurking behind her eyes all this time? Was this the real her, and everything else a plastered-over version held together by all her repressive might?

I looked over at Tracy to see if I could shift her attention to Christine without being obvious, but she was concentrating only on her driving, one eye on the pink line of the GPS system, hurtling us toward the campus. Tracy’s grip on the steering wheel was turning her knuckles white.

None of us wanted to admit it, but we knew. Jack was telling us something with those letters. Sure, he was letting us know he
thought he was still in charge, that he could still reach us anywhere, wherever we were. But he was also telling us he’d left us a clue there. There at that house. Some clue in his sick game that might yield something valuable. But at what price? I knew we all understood it, though none of us could bring ourselves to say it out loud.

We’d try anything else first.

We reached the campus, Tracy hitting every speed bump at five miles an hour too fast. The tires screeched as she pulled into a space in the empty lot next to the psych building. The streetlights over the parking area were just coming on, giving the sky a strange glow. I glanced at the campus security emergency call box on the other side of Tracy, as she emerged from the car. If only that call box could help us now, I thought.

As we walked toward the building, I could see a light on in Adele’s office.

We made our way down the hallway, past the same security guard, who as usual didn’t even give us as much as a sidelong glance. We stood still for a moment in front of Adele’s office door, wondering whether to knock or barge in. I stepped forward and rapped lightly on the door. No answer. Tracy rolled her eyes at me and gestured for me to step aside. I obliged.

She turned the knob and flung the door open wide.

Professor David Stiller was kneeling on the floor, blindfolded, in front of Adele, in a pose of total submission. When she saw us, she jerked upright, her left hand behind her out of sight.

As she recognized us, a slow smile crept over her face.

“I’ll be with you in just a moment.” She said it as if we’d merely caught her busy on the phone.

She signaled for us to close the door. We stepped back out into the hallway stunned. When we recovered, we started whispering in the half-lit hallway.

“More fieldwork,” Tracy said dryly. “She must have a grant.”

I stifled a small laugh, and we moved farther away from the door.

“I thought David Stiller hated Adele, but maybe that was just their idea of foreplay,” I whispered.

At that moment Adele stepped out into the hallway, the model of professional composure. David Stiller followed her, and carefully avoiding eye contact with us, he slipped down the hall back into his own office. Adele didn’t even glance back at him.

She was calm and cool, her face, as ever, a mask. She politely offered us a seat. I took the chair in front of her desk. Christine and Tracy scrunched in next to each other on the small love seat in the corner.

Adele folded her hands in front of her on the desk and leaned forward.

“I thought we were meeting later. Is everything okay?”

“Adele,” I began, “I wanted you to meet Christine.”

Adele looked over at her in awe.

“Yes,
that
Christine,” I said. “So here we are. A complete set.”

I studied her face carefully to try to determine if it was all an act. If she’d delivered those letters, she knew perfectly well who Christine was and where she’d been for the past two days.

“Well,” she said, shaking her head with astonishment, “I have to say I’m really happy to see you all here together. Safe and sound. After all you’ve been through.” She paused. “So what really happened out there today? They aren’t—they aren’t releasing much information to the press.”